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Psst...wanna Triceratops?

14 December 1996

By Jeff Hecht

Boston

IN 1993, a Chinese businessman came to Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers in New
York with a clutch of fossils he had bought from farmers in China. Scientific
consultants who checked the collection spotted a superbly preserved specimen of
a primitive beaked bird that was unlike anything they had seen before.

Phillips will not sell fossils that are “undescribed or new to science”, and
David Herskowitz, who organises the company’s annual natural history auction,
says the consultants “advised me not to touch the bird”. But since then,
scientists in China have found other specimens of the same species, formally
described the bird and named it Confuciusornis. At 120 to 140 million
years old, the fossils are not much younger than relics of
Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, and have opened up a unique window on
avian evolution. Now that it is known to science, Phillips will put its fossil
bird up for auction this Saturday.

That Confuciusornis was first seen by a dealer rather than an
academic at a museum or university is indicative of the value fossils now hold
for private collectors. Burgeoning public interest in palaeontology has created
a multimillion-dollar market for fossils and a lucrative industry for smugglers,
who buy or steal specimens from China, Russia, Australia and elsewhere and sell
them to wealthy collectors in the West. Well preserved or rare specimens are
becoming as desirable as famous paintings. In recent years, thousands of
dinosaur eggs and more than a hundred bird fossils have been sold on the
international market.

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The growing commercial fossil trade is of serious concern to scientists.
Information on the stratigraphic location of fossils—vital for their
dating and the understanding of their ancient environments—is invariably
lost through smuggling. There is also concern that specimens in private
collections will never be studied properly. “A lot of us think that sales of
[vertebrate] fossils are a bad thing,” says Kevin Padian of the University of
California at Berkeley. He claims that some commercial collectors pay American
farmers for exclusive rights to fossils on their land, sometimes forcing
scientists off the site “right in the middle of investigations”.
Palaeontologists also worry that important fossils may vanish completely. Among
those missing is the Maxburg specimen of Archaeopteryx, apparently
stolen from the home of its owner in 1992, shortly after his death.

Neville Pledge, the collection manager at the South Australian Museum in
Adelaide, believes the current roaring international trade in fossils is due
partly to the success of Jurassic Park, the Michael Crichton book and
Steven Spielberg film about dinosaurs. “These got everyone’s interest up,” he
says. Smuggling is now a problem in virtually all countries that have important
fossils. But according to Phil Currie, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell
Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, the most popular source for “some
of the nicer, showier, more expensive specimens” is China. Chinese law now
dictates that only government agencies can buy fossil birds excavated by
farmers, but smugglers will pay much more than the government for a
specimen—the equivalent of months of output from farming.

Since the discovery of the first Confuciusornis fossil, several
others of the same species have been found in China’s Liaoning province. Chinese
institutions hold seven specimens that were examined by Larry Martin, a
palaeontologist at the University of Kansas, while he was working with Chinese
scientists on the first description of Confuciusornis in
Nature (vol 377, p 616). Many more have been smuggled out. “There are
several hundred on the open market, and none of them could have been legally
exported,” says Martin.

An increasing number of the fossils appearing on the international market
come from Australia. John Long, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the
Western Australian Museum, says he regularly sees examples of fossils from South
Australia and Western Australia at mineral displays and other trade fairs
overseas, although it is often difficult to know if they have been obtained
legally or illegally. Tony Thulborn, a palaeontologist at the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, says that scientists themselves are, ironically, part of
the problem. “We have made ourselves a target,” he says. “Australia is the
world’s oldest continent and in recent years there has been a huge increase in
our knowledge of what is out there.”

The extent of the international trade in Australian fossils may be revealed
by an upcoming court case. In 1991, Pledge discovered that a slab of rock
containing a 570-million-year old soft coral fossil had been stolen from a site
in the Ediacara Hills of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. It was later
found in a warehouse in Tokyo. The police investigation led to the seizure at
Perth airport of drums containing Devonian fish from Gogo, Western Australia.
Four men have been charged in connection with the theft. They are due to appear
in court in Perth in April.

Dealers and palaeontologists say Russia is a major source of suspicious
fossils. Some originate in Mongolia, which retains ownership of specimens
excavated by others within its boundaries, so none can be sold legally. Mahito
Watabe of the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences in Okayama, Japan, says he
saw many illegal excavations during a visit to the Gobi desert. Tourists who
bought dinosaur eggs in Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital, have been fined tens of
thousands of dollars. Herskowitz claims he has turned down offers of fossils
from the Gobi desert.

It is still not clear exactly how the smuggled fossils get from rural China
to the markets in the West. Some broken fossils have been repaired, “most likely
with a microscope, as if they came through an institution”, says Charlie
Magovern, who runs the Stone Company in Boulder, Colorado. Some of those from
China may have passed through Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Kraig Derstler of the University of New Orleans has raised money from
individuals and small companies to buy a few of the best bird
fossils—those that he says are “just too precious to be on the
market”—to secure them for the public. He has already bought two, for sums
he would not disclose, and transferred them to his university, where he hopes to
start a museum. Some dealers offered to sell him fossils below their commercial
price, but Derstler also reports some “shady dealers” who became suspicious when
he asked where the birds came from.

Many scientists are pushing their governments to protect their countries’
fossils. Researchers at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and
Palaeoanthropology in Beijing have convinced the Chinese government to tighten
its laws, says Jin Meng, a former staff member now teaching at the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst. Qiu Zhuding, director of the institute in Beijing,
claims several fossil smugglers have been captured and jailed.

In Australia, the 1986 Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act banned the
export fossils, meteorites and Aboriginal art from Australia without a licence.
However, says Long, it is easy for a dealer to maintain that a fossil was
obtained or in circulation more than 10 years ago. The state government of
Western Australia is drafting a law which will make fossil collecting illegal
without a permit. But such laws may not stop the determined amateur. “They want
specimens for their own collections, not to sell,” says Thulburn. He believes
that an amateur collector probably stole two 130 million-year-old
Stegosaurus footprints last October from a rocky coast near Broome in
Western Australia. “Palaeontology owes a lot to amateurs, but there will always
be a few rogues.”

Friends of science

Many dealers in the US and Europe share some of the concerns of scientists.
Henry Galiano, who runs a New York fossil shop called Maxilla and Mandible,
tries to steer unique specimens “in the right direction”. He made a point of
selling the two Confuciusornis fossils he received to people who
promised to share them with museums. Indeed, the American Association of
Paleontological Suppliers (AAPS) has a code of ethics which states that members
will “strive to place specimens of unique scientific interest into responsible
hands for study, research, and preservation”.

Galiano points out that this policy is not purely altruistic. “Most
scientific specimens have no commercial value,” he says. His customers buy
fossils that are beautiful, or “that they can relate to”. Many are happy with
fragments of familiar dinosaurs like Triceratops. In addition, museums
are an important market for many dealers. Mike Triebold, whose Triebold
Paleontology in Valley City, North Dakota, excavates and prepares skeletons from
private property in the US, says 80 to 90 per cent of his business is with
institutions.

However, many dealers are angry at academics who, they say, want to put them
out of business and keep all the fossils for themselves. “Fossils are not rare,”
insists Triebold, who founded the AAPS. He claims that commercial collectors
reduce prices by finding more fossils. He notes that American academics “have
every right to go onto public land”, unlike commercial collectors who are
limited to private property.

Indeed, some experts warn that draconian laws to restrict private collecting
of fossils could be counterproductive. “A lot of this material would never be
dug up if it were not for the commercial incentive,” says Storrs Olson of the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The erosion that exposes fossils would
eventually destroy uncollected ones. Derstler and Martin want to see important
specimens in the hands of scientists, but disagree with purists who would ban
commercial collecting. Dealers “are not nasty people”, says Derstler. “A lot of
them love the fossils too.”